


Recoil Anticipation

by 28ghosts



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: CoWorkers to Friends to Lovers, Crossword Puzzles, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Slow Burn, extensive rumination on prescription medication
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 16:11:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7394419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/pseuds/28ghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A flinch has two phases: the initial response and the defensive response. The initial response is involuntary and cannot be trained. The defensive response is modifiable. The first time Spencer Reid shot a gun, he’d flinched so violently that he nearly dropped the firearm. “No shame in that,” Gideon had told him as they left the practice range. “You’ll get used to it.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Polysensory Zone

**Author's Note:**

> No Beth, no Maeve. Takes place some point after Prentiss is revealed to be alive.
> 
> This chapter references "the Robert Johnson case": SE05EP22, "The Internet Is Forever," where the killer livestreams his murders.
> 
> Definition of startle response taken from Mosby's Dictionary of Medicine.

_Startle reflex_ (n.): _a reflex response to a sudden unexpected stimulus that may be accompanied by physiological effects such as increased heartbeat and respiration, closing of the eyes, and flexion of trunk muscles. The reaction is rapid, pervasive, and uncontrollable, regardless of the unexpected stimulus, which may be as simple as a touch. Also called startle reaction, startle syndrome._

-

The area of the brain that triggers the startle reflex is known as the polysensory zone. The polysensory zone is located in the motor cortex. In monkeys, electric stimulation of the polysensory zone induces flinching even in anesthetized subjects. This has not been studied in humans.

A flinch has two phases: the initial response and the defensive response. The initial response is involuntary and cannot be trained. The defensive response is modifiable. The first time Spencer Reid shot a gun, he’d flinched so violently that he nearly dropped the firearm. “No shame in that,” Gideon had told him as they left the practice range. “You’ll get used to it.”

Firearm flinch is also known as recoil anticipation. It is a common problem for beginning shooters who are more likely to get nervous anticipating the noise and the kick that will come once the they pull the trigger. On the range, a shooter with recoil anticipation will gradually drift their shots low and towards their non-dominant hand, tattooing a diagonal line across the target. Spencer Reid still has a little firearm flinch when he’s tired or not paying attention. Time has helped, and he’s better with guns than he used to be. But he’s still an awkward shot compared to everyone else on the team. He can’t manifest the strange indifference to gunfire that Hotch and Morgan have. Hotch was a SWAT officer, and Morgan was a cop. Of course they’re desensitized. He wonders if Morgan sought out the uncanny ability to remain unblinking in a firefight or if being confident in a shoot-out is something that developed without him noticing it.

Because of course, Spencer never wanted corpses or dilaudid cravings to feel natural, but now they do. Spencer only flinched while injecting himself once. It was the first time he did it alone: at home, on his bathroom floor. He’d been nervous. Startle magnitude and anxiety are closely correlated. If you’re expecting something bad, you flinch harder. Spencer Reid is almost always expecting the worst.

-

Spencer does not take his job as personally as the rest of the team does. Of course he’s disappointed when they fail to save a victim or end up forced to kill an unsub, but not in the same way Hotch and Morgan and JJ are. Spencer sometimes thinks the team forgets how close he was to Gideon, how he had an intimate view of guilt eating away at the most talented profiler he’d ever met. He knows that if he allows guilt to fester, it will destroy him, and what use will he be to the team then? Spencer likes to think of himself as a tool like a profile or a gun. He tries to optimize his performance as a tool. Guilt does not serve a tool. Everyone on the team depersonalizes to a certain extent, but by this point, Spencer is probably the best at it.

Spencer is more sympathetic to their unsubs than anyone else on the team, though. He thinks he understands them best, and some of them he even cares for. He grew up in the shadow of schizophrenia. He knows how fragile the human psychology is because he has watched it crumble, and he has loved yet what’s been left in the ruins. He knows his mother would never deliberately harm anyone, but it’s too easy to imagine what could have become of Diana Reid in a different version of her life. (It’s too hard to imagine what could have become of himself, though.)

These things haven’t always been true and they aren’t always true. Teenaged unsubs spiral him into guilt that he knows is illogical but can’t shake, and schizophrenia still rattles him. He craves dilaudid too often to be truly stable. But Spencer Reid is steadier than he was in his first years at the BAU. He’s earned some confidence in himself.

But he’s still shaken by guns, hates stand-offs and raids. He views them as partial failures that result from an inability to outplay their opponent. Rationally he knows they can’t win every case, but on a certain level that doesn’t matter. But the other thing that bothers him when it comes to gunfights is how much better everyone else on the team handles guns, Hotch especially.

Spencer doesn’t think he’s ever seen Hotch’s hands shake.

Sometimes he hates Hotch for being so resilient. He knows it’s unfair. Hotch has gone through so much and lost so much that his endless stoicism must be a coping mechanism, one he’s entitled to. When he catches himself resenting Hotch, he feels a weird, displaced shame that makes him feel like he’s in high school again, pretending to be older than he is. It’s a petty feeling, especially because Hotch unfailingly challenges Spencer when Spencer feels useless or weak. Hotch is noble, though. Spencer isn’t.

The flight from Boise, Idaho, to Washington, D.C., is just longer than four and a half hours. The flight from Boise to D.C. after the Robert Johnson case seemed twice as long. Spencer had been brooding towards the back of the plane after snapping at Morgan on the car ride to the tarmac. He knew why Morgan was worried, why everyone but Rossi was worried. Rossi’s confusion at the tense atmosphere somehow annoyed Spencer even more, even though rationally he suspected that Rossi knowing about Georgia would have made things worse.

After about an hour of Spencer stonewalling them, the rest of the team had finally taken the hint and left him alone. But Hotch was wandering by to get coffee, and he’d stopped for a second, said, “Can I get you a cup?”

And Spencer had said, “I feel like an idiot.”

Hotch hadn’t said anything.

“It -- it’s been years. I don’t get why it still -- why seeing something like that, it--” 

“Decaf?” Hotch had asked.

“Never,” Spencer said.

Hotch had come back with two cups of coffee and a handful of sugar packets, a few plastic cups of creamer, and sat across from Spencer, watched him doctor his coffee into something drinkable. Spencer liked how Hotch didn’t comment on how much sugar he used, not once. Everyone else had. Not Hotch. When he looked up from stirring the sugar in, Hotch had his head tilted towards the open window, one hand up to his chin.

“Uh, thank you,” Spencer said.

“I can never remember how many packets of sugar you take,” Hotch said.

Spencer grinned kind of awkwardly, raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, leaning in a little, “but I like to change it up.”

Hotch had laughed a little but didn’t look over at him. He had his right hand curled around his paper cup of coffee. Hotch’s nails were always perfectly blunt, his cuticles a little overgrown. Spencer wasn’t a nail biter -- no one on the team was, it was too visible a tell of anxiety for any profiler to display -- but sometimes when he was watching TV he had a bad habit of pushing his cuticles down. Not Hotch, though, of course.

Spencer wanted to say something but bit back on it, suddenly embarrassed for talking so much, pettily angry at Hotch for being dignified and stoic no matter the occasion. When he looked back up from Hotch’s hands to his face, Hotch was looking at him, expression perfectly neutral. Spencer glared.

Hotch didn’t look away. “Of course it gets to you. It would get to any of us.”

Spencer blinked first because of course he did. Spencer always blinked first. “It doesn’t seem like it,” he said.

“Really?”

He gritted his teeth together and exhaled slowly, avoiding admitting to himself that if he stopped sulking, he’d realize Hotch was right.

“You’re tough,” Hotch said.

Spencer let his gaze drift back down to Hotch’s knuckles, the way Hotch’s wrist looked dark against his white dress shirt. When Hotch eventually stood up and left, he still hadn’t touched his coffee, but he took it with him. Spencer had leaned back, closed his eyes, and finally let some of of the tension release from his body. He didn’t know why, but his hands were shaking and he felt sick. He had wished Hotch had stayed with him longer but couldn’t identify why he wanted that or what it would have accomplished or why he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to Hotch in response. So he slumped against the window and tried to ignore the outside world until they landed and fell asleep without meaning to, coffee barely touched.


	2. Beta Receptor Stimulation

Spencer doesn’t mean to find Hotch’s medication.

Hotch is driving the SUV at a speed Spencer is trying not to think about; Morgan is in the passenger seat, and Reid is slouched across all three of the back seats, files spread across his lap. They’re in rural Iowa, early winter, on their way to confront a pitchfork-wielding sexual sadist with a penchant for strangling blonds. Hotch says, “Reid, can you check my bag in the back? I can’t remember if I brought my gloves.”

Spencer cautiously unbuckles himself and twists over the back seat, trying not to think about the likelihood of a spinal injury were Hotch to crash the car at this speed. He lets his files fall -- he’s read them over and over again, enough to memorize them half a dozen times -- and drags Hotch’s go bag into his lap. It’s familiar: worn black leather, silver hardware. For a moment, Spencer is paralyzed by the intimacy of what he's doing. Which -- it's not intimate. It's a go bag. They all have one. He closes his eyes for a second to force himself to focus.

“Where would they be?” he asks, hesitantly unzipping the main compartment. It's absurd how he feels more nervous about sticking his hands in his boss’s private stuff than he does about confronting their unsub, although he thinks the odds for the latter are good for suicide by cop.

“Bottom of the bag, probably, if they’re there. Shit. I think I left them at the hotel.”

“Worried about the cold?” Morgan asks.

“I’ll be fine, but it’d be nice to have them,” Hotch says dourly.

“Uh, yeah, I only see a shirt, socks, copy of the case file…” Reid thinks he should be wearing latex gloves, that he feels like he’s rifling through a victim’s things, and that’s when he sees the translucent orange of a pharmacy bottle. He grabs it without thinking. “And, uh, propranolol?”

“Ooh, Hotch, my man,” says Morgan. “Once a sniper, always a sniper.”

“You know, this is banned at the Olympics.” Spencer squints at the bottle before realizing it would definitely be an invasion of privacy for him to memorize the name and number of Hotch’s pharmacy and prescribing physician. He sticks the bottle back in the bag and keeps rummaging. “It’s considered performance-enhancing.”

“Well, good thing I’m not competing this year,” Hotch says drily. “Don’t worry about it, Reid. I must have left them at the hotel. Let’s review: What do we think the significance of the unsub’s current location is?”

With that, Spencer is mostly distracted from the lingering strangeness of having Hotch’s go bag still open beside him, from realizing Hotch’s spare undershirt smells like cologne. He rattles off the team’s theory about assault by pitchfork being a stabbling-like sexual release, and he realizes out loud that maybe if the unsub knew the FBI was closing in that he might be going back to where everything started for him, and have they had Garcia cross-reference previously interviewed suspects against anyone who might have worked at the farm? And Morgan calls Garcia, Garcia runs it, and there’s no direct match but there is a man named Mac Morrison, previously interviewed, whose father Bob Morrison had worked at the farm, and just like that they have a name.

-

Propranolol belongs to a class of drugs known as beta blockers, so named because they downregulate beta receptor stimulation of smooth muscle. This is especially useful when a subject is experiencing stress. Beta blockers are used primarily to treat arrhythmia and prevent heart attack. They were once commonly prescribed for high blood pressure.

Spencer only knows this because in 2010, a crossword puzzle stumped him with the clue “inderal,” the name of the first high blood pressure medication in the beta-blocker class. Later he remembered the New York Times’ use of “beta blocker” as a clue for “VHS,” which he’d found funny and tried to explain to Morgan, but Morgan didn’t care, which wasn’t that much of a surprise. Spencer likes telling Morgan things he knows Morgan won’t care about because it’s the easiest way to get a rise out of him, and Morgan’s never quite sure whether Spencer is messing with him or not.

A few days after Iowa, Spencer sticks his head in Hotch’s office and says, before Hotch can greet him, “Sorry for reading your medication label out in front of Morgan; that was rude, wasn’t it?”

Hotch gives him a look that Spencer thinks might be part long-suffering and part relieved, though it’s hard to tell. Hotch is just like that: kind of inscrutable. There are three separate stacks of paperwork on Hotch’s desk, and the hair on the top of his head, the only place where it hasn’t recently been trimmed short, is sticking up a little like he’s run his hands through it in frustration. “Dr. Reid. Pleasure to see you, too.”

Spencer likes when Hotch calls him Dr. Reid sarcastically. Hotch always introduces him as Dr. Reid, just like Gideon always did, because even though he’s older now, old enough most people don’t double-take when they meet him, he still doesn’t quite blend in. Spencer thinks he’ll probably always look more like a professor than an FBI agent. But the sarcasm is a rare hint that Hotch actually knows Spencer, that while they might not be friends exactly, they have each others’ backs.

“Can I grab you a cup of coffee? I was just about to get one,” Spencer says.

The ambiguity in Hotch’s expression melts away and resolves into a professional level of gratitude. “God, absolutely.” He hands Spencer an empty mug with the FBI seal on it.

Spencer is back just a few minutes later, elbowing Hotch’s door open with a little too much force. He sets down Hotch’s mug directly on top of Hotch’s paperwork, which Hotch kind of snorts at, and sits in the chair across from Hotch’s desk.

“We were talking about my medication. It was a little bit rude, but if it was really all that private I wouldn’t have had it visible in my bag or asked you to go through it,” Hotch says.

Another thing Spencer likes is how Hotch doesn’t just abruptly restart conversations like Morgan and JJ do sometimes. Sometimes it takes him longer than he’d care to admit to shift gears, leaves him scrambling to remember the prior conversation. “Okay,” Spencer says. “I was worried I’d, uh, crossed a line.”

Hotch wraps both hands around his mug. Hotch’s hands are big, wide, more masculine than Spencer’s, so his fingers interlace. “No harm done,” he says wearily.

The reason why propranolol is banned in competitive sharpshooting and golf is because of its secondary effect: It masks outward manifestations of anxiety. Propranolol minimizes anxiety-induced tachycardia and hand tremors and is commonly taken by professional musicians and singers and, Spencer has recently learned, snipers.

Spencer isn’t sure why he’s sprawled out in one of Hotch’s chairs, scanning Hotch’s bookshelves, trying to make smalltalk. He’s not sure, but he’s thinking about firearm flinch, about propranolol. Before dilaudid, Spencer had been terrified of drugs because some small, irrational part of him was convinced taking even acetaminophen could trigger latent schizophrenia. After dilaudid, he’s just terrified. It’s not like propranolol has recreational use, and there’s a dozen reasons Hotch could be taking it. Hotch is old enough to feasibly have high blood pressure, and even though Reid knows Hotch’s father died of lung cancer, heart attacks could run in the family. For all Spencer knows, Hotch’s go bag had a bottle of baby aspirin in it, too, but Spencer just found the propranolol first.

“Paperwork especially bad today?” Spencer asks awkwardly.

Hotch groans and says something about budget-cutting season, and Spencer asks how, historically, Hotch has managed to keep them from the worst of it, and suddenly they’re talking the extent to which the BAU can be asked to balance distance consulting and on-site consulting on high cool-down killer cases when it’s so hard to tell from an initial briefing which killers will deteriorate faster once it’s clear the police are involved, meaning the BAU would be necessary to minimize loss of life.

“You might consider writing a paper on this, you know, a review of existing case studies,” Hotch says. “You might be onto something prioritizing signs of narcissism.”

“Not a chance if the bureau might use it to try and take away our jet next year,” Reid says darkly, and Hotch actually laughs at that. Not hard, but he laughs, which Spencer also likes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, y'all; I so appreciate the kind words and kudos. Next chapter won't take so long to get uploaded!


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